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Everyone knows I am so in love with flowers and especially edible ones. France is such a treasure of candied flower treats! I want to create something special and I am listening in my heart for the flavors, colors and soul of Saint Marie De Monfort’s birth place to inspire me.

Today I am exploring the scents, music, flowers and soul of the region where Saint Louis Marie De Monfort was born. Everyone knows I am so in love with flowers and especially edible ones. France is such a treasure of candied flower treats!

I want to create something special and I am listening in my heart for the flavors, colors and soul of Saint Louis Marie De Monfort’s birth place to inspire me. I first think of strawberries, vanilla and a magical golden effortless syrup of music.

There is a wonderful golden tea from Darjeeling. I was only able to purchase 1 kilo. It was rare and so delightful. These precious teas, do not need the addition of flowers really, because they were fed flowers from the inception of their first seedlings by the Gods and the Snow Leopards at night. The mountains of the Himalaya’s are utterly fecund with a delicate fiery grace within the air itself. The soil has a rich yet delicate spice. The magnolias and magical plants are in fact the base for Mary Magdalene’s famous ointment.

Alas? Now…. I have an idea? perhaps’ I will try to acquire some of this precious tea and make a special batch of candy and desserts strawberries and flowers in Saint Marie de Montfort. I pray for his bright blessings upon us and especially for someone special, that he hear our prayers.

This is a magical site, I do so adore. It is filled with the love, merriment, vigor and expertise of a wise group of magicians.

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viii. Goddess of the SwanThe Irish Brigid or Bridget, Scottish Bride, or Manx Bree, or Breeshey derive from a common root, a female deity who almost certainly served as the tutelary goddess for the first Iron Age peoples to enter Britain in the first millennium BC. Her cult lingered through until Romano-British times, most obviously as the divine patron of the Brigantes, the powerful northern tribe famously led at the time of the Roman conquest by the warrior queen Cartamandua.

With the arrival of Christianity Brigid became a saint, celebrated as Jesus’s nursemaid, and sometimes even as his mother under the name ‘Mary of the Gaels’. St Bride, or Bridget, bore an assortment of animal forms, but by far the most significant is that of the white swan.

In her role as patron of childbirth, Bride-Bridget was associated with the Milky Way, where the celestial swan flies, and her mark was the bird’s foot, anticipated by peoples of the Scottish Western Isles in their hearth on the morning of her feast day. This same symbol was associated by Welsh bards and druids with the goddess Minerva, the given to the Gallic form of Brigantia, or Brigid, by the Romans.

Yet what might any of this have to do with Avebury’s cult of the dead?A more direct association between swans and the northerly transmigration of the soul comes in the knowledge that in the Scottish Western Isles people saw whooper swans and also greylag geese migrating northwards to their breeding grounds in Iceland each spring as carrying the souls of the dead to heaven, which lay ‘north beyond the north wind’, an expression borrowed from classical mythology.

Should a person be alive when the birds depart, then they would be free from death for another year. Cygnus being essentially circumpolar in Scotland would always have been seen in the northern night sky.

Is this how the stars of Cygnus became associated with the swan, and why the bird was linked with not only the cosmic axis, but also the journey of the soul into the afterlife – because it was seen to fly towards the celestial pole? If so, then this connection can only have begun when Deneb occupied the position of Pole Star in c. 15,000 BC. Swans in flight.Among the peoples of the Baltic the swan replaced the stork as the bringer of new-born babies,

showing that it both brought life and took it away again. This process of giving and taking life is exemplified at Çatal Huyuk in Southern-central Turkey where Neolithic wall sculptures contain vulture’s skulls inserted horizontally so that the tips become the nipples of sculpted breasts, while murals nearby show human foetuses inside the bodies of vultures.The cult of Bride-Bridget exemplified these archaic beliefs, and these survived through until the nineteenth century in the Scottish Western Isles.

However, evidence of her worship in England has been scant until now. Yet archaeologists working in South-west England have recently unearthed macabre evidence of a pagan cult of the swan, possibly associated with the goddess Bride-Bridget, which survived through until the 1640s. It comes in the form of a series of earthen pits unearthed at Saveock, Cornwall, and found to contain carcasses of swans, as well as other votive offerings such as eggs, down feathers, crystals and stones.

It is important to recall that at this time England was under Puritan rule, with the punishment for any kind of sympathetic folk magic being very severe indeed.In Britain, the cult of the swan is likely to have come under the protection of Bride, whose feast day, 1st February, marked thenorthern departure of the migrating swans. Yet her worship proved to be only half the story, for a whole different cult of the swan once surrounded the return of the birds each November, a fact echoed in an archaic ceremony that continues each year on the River Thames.Links Events News Books Cygnus Meonia QuestCon Articles Email

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Incorrectly known as BRIDGET.Born in 451 or 452 of princely ancestors at Faughart, near Dundalk, County Louth; d. 1 February, 525, at Kildare. Refusing many good offers of marriage, she became a nun and received the veil from St. Macaille. With seven other virgins she settled for a time at the foot of Croghan Hill, but removed thence to Druin Criadh, in the plains of Magh Life, where under a large oak tree she erected her subsequently famous Convent of Cill-Dara, that is, “the church of the oak” now Kildare, in the present county of that name. It is exceedingly difficult to reconcile the statements of St. Brigids biographers, but the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Lives of the saint are at one in assigning her a slave mother in the court of her father Dubhthach, and Irish chieftain of Leinster. Probably the most ancient life of St. Brigid is that by St. Broccan Cloen, who is said to have died 17 September, 650. It is metrical, as may be seen from the following specimen:Ni bu Sanct Brigid suanach Ni bu huarach im sheire Dé, Sech ni chiuir ni cossens Ind nóeb dibad bethath che.Saint Brigid was not given to sleep, Nor was she intermittent about Gods love; Not merely that she did not buy, she did not seek for The wealth of this world below, the holy one.Cogitosus, a monk of Kildare in the eighth century, expounded the metrical life of St. Brigid, and versified it in good Latin. This is what is known as the “Second Life”, and is an excellent example of Irish scholarship in the mid-eighth century. Perhaps the most interesting feature of Cogitosuss work is the description of the Cathedral of Kildare in his day: “Solo spatioso et in altum minaci proceritate porruta ac decorata pictis tabulis, tria intrinsecus habens oratoria ampla, et divisa parietibus tabulatis”. The rood-screen was formed of wooden boards, lavishly decorated, and with beautifully decorated curtains. Probably the famous Round Tower of Kildare dates from the sixth century. Although St. Brigid was “veiled” or received by St. Macaille, at Croghan, yet, it is tolerably certain that she was professed by St. Mel of Ardagh, who also conferred on her abbatial powers. From Ardagh St. Macaille and St. Brigid followed St. Mel into the country of Teffia in Meath, including portions of Westmeath and Longford. This occurred about the year 468. St. Brigids small oratory at Cill-Dara became the centre of religion and learning, and developed into a cathedral city. She founded two monastic institutions, one for men, and the other for women, and appointed St. Conleth as spiritual pastor of them. It has been frequently stated that she gave canonical jurisdiction to St. Conleth, Bishop of Kildare, but, as Archbishop Healy points out, she simply “selected the person to whom the Church gave this jurisdiction”, and her biographer tells us distinctly that she chose St. Conleth “to govern the church along with herself”. Thus, for centuries, Kildare was ruled by a double line of abbot-bishops and of abbesses, the Abbess of Kildare being regarded as superioress general of the convents in Ireland.

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37 A girl wearing a traditional mantilla dress takes part in the procession of “Gitanos” brotherhood during Holy Week in the Andalusian city of Malaga, southern Spain, April 18, 2011. Reuters/Jon Nazca #